Recent reviews by SaveMeXenu

I haven't finished the game yet, but I think I've played enough to say with certainty that it's one of the weaker games in the franchise. It's actually like aggressively mediocre in many ways. The ship sailing is absolutely awful, it's worse than a budget version of Assassin's Creed 4. The ship combat also feels much worse than I was expecting. Not enough needing to position for broadsides. It's very arcadey and I frankly don't really like it.
Aside from that, it uses the same skill spammy combat system that Ys Seven introduced to the detriment (in my opinion at least) to the series. I VASTLY preferred the combat style of Origin/Oath/Ark.
The exploration is also so infuriating. I'm 26 hours in and the game is still hard railroading me. It'll tease you with a nice open area with your ship, but trying to explore without doing the story first in an area will have you hitting invisible walls in all directions. It's genuinely so awful.
There's other incredibly annoying things that the game does as well, such as have you need to press the select button to do certain actions, this ranges from pulling out your fishing rod to talking to crew members while sailing to leaving the helm and going inside your ship. This would be fine, except anytime anybody is speaking, it blocks you from doing this. This, also, would be only a minor annoyance, except your characters always exclaims that there's fish in an area (that you can already clearly see) and you have to wait for the text box to disappear like 15 seconds later before the game allows you to pull out your fishing rod. Another notable thing that pissed me off; the devs decided that it was a good idea to put an NPC directly in front of the table you need to interact with in order to do ship upgrades, which means you need to walk in and then move around the room to the other side of the table before you can interact with it.
Honestly, the only things I've thought were great so far are the soundtrack and Karja.

The game literally crashed 3 times in the space of 5 minutes.
Just play Baldur's Gate 3 instead. At least that game doesn't lecture you and show CIS people going through humiliation rituals for the grave crime of misgendering somebody.

Giving this a negative review just so it's maybe more visible to devs if they care; I have an i9 13900k and a very high performance liquid cooling system that has no issues in any other game, but when compiling shaders in this game, because there isn't any sort of CPU throttling, it runs my CPU so hard that it overheats and shuts down my computer. I have to manually throttle the game myself in order to finish compiling.
Aside from that, the performance is also embarrassingly bad. I have a 3080 TI and 32 gbs of RAM and this game struggles to get 60 FPS or higher outside of the prologue at 1080p.

Advertising this game as single player should actually be considered false advertisement. You cannot play this game on the hardest difficulty without 2 friends. The AI is just way too ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ useless. I would refund this if I wasn't past the 2 hour mark.
General gameplay is typically fine, but eventually you hit the big setpiece sections where you have to defend X, be it chains from gargoyles or a reactor from Tyranids jumping into it to overload it. These sections, at least on Angel of Death, are so INCREDIBLY frustrating to try to do solo. Also the sections involving the Ripper swarms are legitimately some of the worst sections I have ever played through in a video game in my life, and I've been gaming for 34 years. There's no way to sugarcoat it. I ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hate them and I hope whoever designed them is not given leave to design levels ever again. I came close to just uninstalling the game after the reactor section. It was that awful.
The game is fun for the most part, but it is absolutely not designed to be played solo.

The game might be fun, I have no idea though because I have been largely unable to actually play the game. Every time I try to trigger an open world mission, some max level player comes in and annihilates everything and then expects to be thanked for their service.

You can be banned for saying anything negative. The wording around what language you are allowed to use is incredibly vague, so what ends up happening is people disingenuously report you just because they know if they tick the right boxes and act hurt, you WILL be temporarily banned.
Yes, it leads to the community looking nicer on a surface level, but underneath that, people find ways to be toxic without breaking the ToS.
The game is fine,I wouldn't have 10k hours in it if it wasn't, but the community is like to give you an ulcer if you try to do any harder content.
Yes! I love when bootlickers give me free steam points in the form of jester awards! Please give me more.

The things you can be banned for in this game are utterly insane. The game is good, but the community is so carebear that you can be banned for calling somebody dumb.

Ah yes, the bootlickers have shown up to hand out jester awards. It's cute that you guys think that does anything but give me steam points. Please continue to give them to me.

Absolutely ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ not. Requires Epic Games account. Refunded.

Edit: Pretty ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ disgusting that people are not only excusing this garbage, but ridiculing those who aren't happy about it. Gaming has a dark future ahead of it.

I wish I could give this a mixed review. I don't know why Steam doesn't have that option yet. I have just completed the DLC with a strength/faith build with no co-op outside of Bayle and the fight prior to the final boss, as well as no spirit ashes whatsoever.
First off, I think the Scadutree Fragments are a very bad mechanic. I understand what they were going for with it, having a sense of progression in the DLC still instead of going in at rune level 300 and just stomping everything, as well as giving them out as meaningful rewards for exploration. On paper it seems great, but in practice it basically punishes you for heading south first. Most of the Scadutree Fragments are hidden up north. I went south first and beat Bayle at blessing level 3. It was not fun. I think it's a little counter intuitive to design an open world game that railroads you into one path so you can get the fragments to be strong enough to do what you want.
Secondly, I think some of the bosses are so incredibly frustrating to fight that they go far beyond satisfying and are just flat-out un-fun.
Some things I really enjoyed though were that they put real effort into designing all the catacombs and dungeons, which were actually fun to explore and had really neat items inside and didn't always have the same copy+pasted boss at the end.
Weapons and spells and ashes of war were also incredibly cool. I also liked most of the NPCs. Some of the boss fights were also great, such as Messmer and the final boss of the Abyssal Forest section.
It's sitting at a negative for me though because honestly, I found the overall experience outside of a few bosses to be more frustrating than fun and fun is why we play video games in the first place.
Leaving comments open so that on the off-chance that people read this, they can flood the comments with how much of a casual I am and how I need to get good to enjoy the game.

You can purchase the "Positive Review" Premium Warbond for 1000 Supercredits.
Or just fire the awful community managers that were flaming the fanbase.